High CEO pay eyed

By RICK KARLIN, Capitol bureau
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First published: Monday, July 12, 2010

ALBANY — Helping people with mental disabilities is a big business in rural Sullivan County.

And it pays well, too — at least if you’re the CEO.

The Center for Discovery — which serves people with autism, developmental delays and other brain disorders — is the county’s largest employer with 1,400 people on the payroll. At the top of that list is CEO Patrick Dollard, who has drawn attention for his half-million-dollar pay package and a wide menu of perks including “several retirement plans,” restaurant bills in the triple digits and deluxe bottles of wine, according to the state’s Commission on Quality of Care, a watchdog agency that released a May report on the Sullivan County center.

Compensation for those who run these mental health centers, which are private but rely heavily on tax-funded Medicaid payments, may soon become the latest target of lawmakers and state officials.

As New Yorkers increasingly groan under the weight of chart-topping property taxes as well as income taxes and assorted fees, the pay packages of those who run our publicly funded institutions is steadily drawing more attention.

Dollard’s salary, for example, was listed as the 20th-highest statewide out of the 658 mental health agencies that responded to a 2006 commission survey on CEO compensation at nonprofit centers that serve people with mental disabilities. In that survey, Dollard drew a salary of $338,276 — with fringe benefits, his pay package was $587,759.

The Commission on Quality of Care’s release noted that the median pay of the 658 CEOs in 2006 was $117,000. But some earned quite a bit more.

Thirty-nine CEOs earned more than $250,000 in 2006, and 82 were paid more than $200,000, according to a Times Union analysis of the data.

The commission also documented perks such as cars for the top officers of mental health centers, ranging from Toyotas and Chevrolets to luxurious Audis, Volvos and a Jaguar.

Another finding: There’s little correlation between the size of a given mental health center and what the CEO earned.

The Center for Discovery houses 300 and serves a total of about 800 mentally disabled people, including students from surrounding schools. Like other such centers, it also operates a health clinic that’s open to the public.

But Dollard’s pay was comparable to levels at much larger facilities on Long Island or in New York City, the commission contended.

Historically, mental hygiene organizations like the Center for Discovery have received little attention, even though there are hundreds of them statewide and they receive hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer dollars each year.

As nonprofits, they are typically led by privately appointed boards of directors, and they hire people outside of the civil service system.

They have to be licensed by the state, usually the Offices of Mental Health or Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities. But those agencies have no direct say regarding what the CEO and other top officials are paid.

Many centers care for a spectrum of disabilities, from autism and developmental delays to psychiatric illnesses or drug addictions.

CQC released the compensation data in April to the Times Union following a Freedom of Information Law request from the paper. On the same day, they also put out a public report on the survey — causing some to wonder if the Commission had been sitting on the four-year-old data.

The public report, however, did not identify any of the agencies, nor did it contain individual names or salaries.

Also, the long lapse between when the data was collected and when it was released under the FOIL request could make oversight by others — be they local watchdogs or politicians — a bit difficult. For some potential legal issues, the delay also means the clock could be running on statutes of limitation.

CQC officials say they weren’t trying to delay or bury the data. “It took a while for us to finish writing the report and massaging the data,” said commission spokesman Gary Masline.

He stressed that the commission has no enforcement power. “We were hoping that this would provide a tool not only for CQC but the authorizing agencies like OMRDD,” said Masline.

There are some difficulties with making apples-to-apples comparisons in the data.

The highest-paid CEO in 2006, Barbra Minch at Manhattan’s William F. Ryan Community Health Center, made more than $1 million, according to the survey. But that amount included a one-time distribution from retirement money.

Last year, Minch earned $283,000, said spokesman Robert Leonard. He added that the Ryan Center also operates five primary-care centers in Manhattan that saw 180,000 patient visits last year. She also took a $10,000 pay cut due to the economic downturn. Only about 7 percent of the organization’s patient load is for the mentally disabled.

Sullivan County’s Center for Discovery also operates a general health clinic, with between 15,000 and 20,000 visits annually, said its lawyer Steven Mosenson.

The Center for Discovery strongly disagreed with much of CQC’s May report, contending it “misrepresents facts” regarding their CEO’s compensation. The center claims Dollard’s base salary is in line with that at comparable nonprofits. The CQC study, Mosenson added, is “stale and outdated.”

“Many of those things that were cited (in the 2006 report) we’ve either long since corrected or we disagreed with them,” said Mosenson, who also noted that the pay package is in keeping with IRS guidelines.

Mosenson also pointed out that the dispute doesn’t call into question the quality of care given at Center for Discovery.

Others nonprofits have drawn occasional scrutiny for their finances over the years.

The Queens-based PSCH, whose former CEO Ralph Farkas was paid $560,421 in 2006, was removed from the organization two years ago, said spokesman Willie Scott.

At the time, the Attorney General’s office was examining the organization. Farkas was also being paid by an affiliated fund-raising organization which paid him more than it gave out in grants, according to published reports.

There are some notable names in the report: The 19th highest salary went to William Rapfogel, who earned $339,808 as head of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty. His wife, Judith, is Assembly Democratic Speaker Sheldon Silver’s chief of staff.

Despite those episodes, advocates say close scrutiny of compensation for mental health CEOs is rare but worth a look.

“This gets into the question of control over spending,” remarked Rockland County Executive Scott Vanderhoef, who several years ago led a push to partially cap Medicaid costs. “It’s one of a number of issues that needs to be looked at.”

“This would be something of concern,” added Ron Levine, spokesman for Sen.Thomas Morahan, R-New City, who chairs the Senate’s Mental Health Committee. “Everyone is entitled to make a fair living, but when these groups come before us they don’t focus on that what they are paying for administrative costs.”

Note: Data is from 2006; some of the CEOs listed are no longer in those jobs. Barbra Minch’s salary includes a one-time retirement distribution. Source: NYS Commission on Quality of Care and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities.